Monthly Archives: June 2002

Actually the NSA story has some personal resonance for me. One of my uncles was a spy. He worked for many years as an intelligence analyst for NSA. He was not allowed to say what languages he spoke, but I know that one of them was Arabic because of books he had in his house. He is retired now, but if he were still working he would be in the »

Congress always wants to be taken seriously in wartime, but it isn’t going to happen as long as we keep getting stories like this one. Now Nancy Pelosi is suggesting (with no evidence, of course) that the leak about the NSA intercepts may have come from the Administration. Those who think the Democrats are capable of putting national security ahead of politics–if there are such people–haven’t been reading the newspapers. »

This is great. Arafat now wants to accept the settlement terms proposed by Bill Clinton two years ago. Sorry, Yasser, that was then, this is now. At some time in human history there may have been a worse-led group of people than the Palestinian Arabs, but I can’t think of one offhand. »

In order to evaluate Irving’s work, Evans undertakes a study of the phenomenon of Holocaust denial and of Irving’s books. He also reviewed a trove of Irving’s speeches and other incidental materials obtained in discovery from Irving prior to the trial. Evans usefully summarizes the phenomenon of Holocaust denial as comprising four elements that constitute the creed of its proponents: 1) the Nazis murdered far fewer than six million Jews; »

Let’s take a brief intermission in our consideration of Richard Evans’s book, “Lying About HItler.” My oldest daugher (of three; would you be interested in joining my therapy group for fathers of three daughters? Just kidding, girls…) just graduated from Minnesota’s finest private high school. Her graduating class had 18 (out of a total of only 90 students) National Merit Semifinalists. The Minnesota high school with the next highest number »

David Irving is a fairly well known British historian of WWII from the German side. His book Hitler’s War may be his most well known, but he has also written other highly regarded books such as a biographies of Rommel and Goebbels. Irving is a professional historian in the sense that he has made his living writing these books; he has no college education and holds no university post. Deborah »

In 1895 Oscar Wilde brought his infamous defamation lawsuit against the Marquess of Queensberry, alleging that he had been defamed by imputations of homosexuality made by the Marquess. The libel was of course true; the Marquess had taken after Wilde to deter Wilde from continuing his homosexual relationship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. For Wilde the lawsuit was a monumental act of self-destruction. When the Marquess proved the truth »

Tonight Arafat is being quoted as saying that the Israelis’ building of a wall to block West Bank murderers from entering their country is “racist” and constitutes “apartheid.” Let’s see…killing people on account of their ethnicity is fine, but if they try to defend themselves by simply making it harder for the murderers to get at them, that’s “racist.” This guy is getting to the point where he’s no longer »

Yesterday the Democrats were out in force on the Sunday talk shows, urging a harder line against Saudi Arabia and supporting the overthrow of Saddam. Is this a sign that the Democrats are trying to get to Bush’s right on the war? Nah. They’re just spooked by the appalling poll results they get whenever they criticize the Administration on the war or come across as squishy. They’ve concluded that for »

The Administration is leaking stories about the President’s orders to the CIA to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Presumably, this is to encourage anti-Saddam elements in Iraq and to persuade those in Iraq who are now on the fence that they had better get onto the winning team. Meanwhile, Debka File is reporting that the goal of President Bush’s statement on the Middle East, expected later this week, “will not »

This interview with the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, is pretty chilling. This is the guy who wrote a poem praising the 17 year old girl who committed mass murder in Israel. About the poem, he says, “I knew that the poem would spark debate, but sometimes a man must take a stand.” Yeah, you just can’t look at yourself in the mirror if you haven’t come out »

Tonight my wife and five year old daughter and I went to a concert at an amphitheater near our home. We drank some beer and listened to two very good blues bands I’d never heard of. It was a lovely summer night, only drizzling occasionally. I thought, What a great night to be alive. And that reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for a very long time. It »

Tom Daschle is the lowest of the low. Now he appears to be suggesting that the Administration is obliged to withhold information on captured terrorists indefinitely, lest Americans’ knowledge of the facts get in the way of his criticisms of the security agencies. This guy has an ego the size of Mount Rushmore. »